One of the greatest strengths of a personal computer (PC) platform is its heterogeneity. PCs generally include components from different manufacturers such as different central processing units (CPUs), video cards, motherboards, etc. Furthermore, each PC may have different drivers and software installed. This heterogeneity shortens the cycles for new hardware availability, giving PCs a performance and feature set edge over fixed consoles (e.g. game consoles).
Fixed consoles such as game consoles (e.g. Sony PlayStation®, XBox, etc.) are extremely homogeneous. All consoles from a given generation are identical. This results in a longer time cycle between releases of generations of consoles, generally about 4 years. However, this homogeneity is a great advantage for application developers. For example, when developing games for game consoles, game developers can be sure that their code will run on a system of an end-user in exactly the same manner as it does on a development system.
Unlike the PC platform, the game developers for game consoles only need to test a single platform. Because of the homogeneity of the game console, there are no concerns with different drivers, different amounts of memory, different graphics processing units (GPUs), etc. Furthermore, the game developers never need to be concerned about future-proofing their software so hardware released after their game is released will run properly.
PC game developers, like other PC application developers, want to insure that a game will run on as many PCs as possible. Unfortunately, most game developers do not have the resources to do quality assurance on even the most popular PC configurations. The quality assurance processes for PC game developers are generally biased toward testing as much of the game as possible (e.g. different levels, maps, scenarios, etc.). As a result, default settings for in-game parameters in most PC games are set to the lowest common denominator. PC game developers want to make sure that the game will run on any PC, and lacking the significant resources to test the myriad of hardware combinations, the lowest common denominator is their only option. Additionally, in-game settings are seldom changed by a user in order to maximize performance due to complexity, lack of accessibility, and/or other issues.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.